The first children you see are scything away in the cassava fields, or filling plastic cans with water from the pump to lug home.

But inside the local library in this town deep in the Rwandan hinterland, we skip forward a few centuries: e-readers, Wi-Fi, smartphones and digital books galore, everything from Dickens to Dante and Dostoevsky.

John Kanyambo is 12, and has his nose buried in a digital book – an easy reader called Come and Play. His English is getting better. Previous generations have been ill-served by a chronic lack of physical books, but John has more than 150 digital titles to choose from.

“We like to come to the library because there are many new ideas in each book,” he says. His friend Dany Tuyizere, 12, shyly agrees. “I like to come because I learn more new words.”

When the reading session is over, it’s time to walk home – a 2.5-mile (4km) hike through the fields for John. He doesn’t mind. He enjoys books so much that he does the two-hour round trip almost every day.

Such are the anachronisms of 21st-century Africa, where digital innovations are trumpeted daily, but where large swaths of society have not even experienced an agricultural revolution, let alone a technological one.

Rwinkwavu is a good case in point. A community of 30,000 people, it is home principally to poor farmers who wheel bikes laden with green bananas with one hand while holding feature phones – mobiles with basic internet – in the other.

By day they labour in the fields, but in the evenings and at weekends they cluster in the library to access its e-reading programmes.

The e-readers were donated by worldreader.com, a Barcelona-based charity. Crucially, as well as the titles preloaded on the devices, there are another 5,000 titles available to basic mobile phones over a 2G network.

So for example, when news of the Zika virus in Brazil started to sow alarm here, doctors and ordinary people were able to instantly access publications explaining the virus.

“The culture of reading is really low across Rwanda but this is free, so people can access it and feel empowered,” says Jean-Marie Habimana, a local staffer for the Ready for Reading charity, which built the library and set up the programmes it offers.

The knock-on effects of encouraging barely literate adults to read more are instructive. Habimana and colleague Emmanuel Ndayambaje say they are suddenly capable of so much more – from opening bank accounts to understanding contracts and the opportunities of the wider world.

“Some adults who attended our classes are now much more confident – able to write bank cheques and understand banking, able to write letters and apply quickly for jobs,” says Ndayambaje.

Betsey Dickey, founder and executive director of the nonprofit organisation behind the library, Ready4reading, says that at first people were somewhat sceptical of something they didn’t really understand.

“People were intimidated,” she says. “Then you see a neighbour who’s been going who’s now literate and can run a business … Now the whole community has embraced the opportunities available. Women come to library and want literacy and bring their children too.”

The Rwinkwavu project is by no means unusual in Africa. Worldreader says it is channelling its digital books into hundreds of schools and libraries in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, reaching more than 100,000 children, thanks to partnerships with more than 350 publishers. New projects for Cameroon and Namibia are in the pipeline.

Worldreader co-founder Colin McElwee says that of course there are obstacles to operations – the lack of availability of books in local languages is one, as is patchy connectivity in some places.

But he is heartened by the rapid uptake of the technology since Worldreader was launched six years ago. The majority of readers, he says, are boys (“in sub-Saharan Africa the holder of the device is often the elder brother”), but girls read far more avidly, he says.

“We want to get people reading and enjoying it. We don’t want to be preachy,” he says. “There is massive inequality in the world. Africa needs education at scale to start closing the gaps.”